Twelve diverse and eccentric tales, each offering a vignette of sorts of life in Northern Ireland. Jenkinson has an arresting ability to capture intimacy in domestic spaces; meaning resides in the little gestures exchanged between her characters, in the small words they use to capture the universal emotions we all share. Each character experiences a transcendence of sorts, an elevation above the profane, the mundane.

Though set in a contemporary Belfast, these stories seem simultaneously removed from life now, pervaded by a kind of timelessness that unsettles the reader as well as drawing them in.